Our No Mas Knockout of the Week is from this past Saturday night, and is unquestionably an early candidate for the Knockout of the Year. It came on the undercard of the Diaz/Morales fight when IBF junior flyweight (that’s 108 pounds folks) champion Ulises Solis knocked out Rodel Mayol in the eighth round of their title bout with a lightning-quick, and if I may so, bizarre one-two. Mayol had the champ on the canvas in the sixth and was still stalking him in this round. Early on he catches Solis with a monster overhand right that prompts the chest-thumping show of bravado that is universal language for “oh yeah that was a big shot.” Soon afterwards, Solis ceases thumping his chest and instead thumps Mayol, following up a stiff left jab with a right that is half a cross and half a karate chop. The combined effect of the two blows leave Mayol crawling around like an infant who’s all drunk on Hennessey. As his handlers lead the dazed victim back to his corner, the announcer points out that Mayol has a smile on his face and says, “even he admires the punch.” I, uh, disagree with that interpretation. It seems clear to me that holms is smiling due to a brief but severe bout of retardification.

Fifty years ago, the Irish-bred colt Gallant Man won the historic Travers Stakes at Saratoga racetrack. Half a century ago, crowds of racing fans were drawn to the famous spa in upstate New York, and later this month, large crowds of fans will watch the renewal of the Travers, which is likely to feature a rematch between this year’s Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense and Preakness winner Curlin.

Gallant Man didn’t have another classic winner to contend with in his running of the Travers, although the Triple Crown had been split three ways in 1957, just as it was this year. Gallant Man probably should have won two of the races, but he lost the Kentucky Derby in one of the oddest finishes in the race’s history. The famous jockey Bill Shoemaker (pictured on the horse above) rode Gallant Man, and their primary opposition was Bold Ruler, Round Table, and Iron Liege. Before the Derby, Gallant Man’s owner, Ralph Lowe, had dreamt that his jockey misjudged the finish and his colt lost the race. And in fact, that is just what happened. In a momentary misjudgment of the finish line, Shoemaker paused , almost imperceptibly , in riding Gallant Man to the wire, and Iron Liege won by a nose. Round Table was third, and favored Bold Ruler was fourth.

In the 1957 Preakness, Gallant Man , who was a peanut of a classic winner, standing only 5′ 1” at the withers [top of a horse's shoulders] , sat out the race, which was won by the grander, faster Bold Ruler. They had a rematch in the Belmont. Gallant Man’s stablemate, Bold Nero, raced near Bold Ruler through the first half of the race to keep the favorite from relaxing on the lead, and Gallant Man blew away from his competition to win by eight lengths and set a new American record of 2:26.60 for a mile and a half. That record stood until 1973, when Bold Ruler’s greatest son, a Triple Crown-winner by the name of Secretariat, won the race by 31 lengths in the time of 2:24.
—————————————————————————————-
Frank Mitchell lives on a farm where he writes and raises horses about 30 minutes from Keeneland. He’s written two books on horse-racing and writes a regular column on Thoroughbred bloodlines for Daily Racing Form that can be found at drf.com.

Has the image of any 20th century American icon experienced a more enormous fall from grace than Joe DiMaggio? Talking about this with I-Berg at lunch the other day, the only name that came to mind was JFK, who indeed has seen his name dragged through the mud in the past 20 years, but who also accomplished so much as President that the mere revelation of his womanizing and overall personal ruthlessness did not prove quite enough to entirely tarnish his memory.

I suppose the same could be said for DiMaggio at the purest level – can the tag of “misanthropic cheapskate” ever really put a dent in Joe D.’s epic accomplishments on the diamond? Of course not. Then again, DiMaggio as cultural symbol transcended those accomplishments so thoroughly that his fall – from icon of innate grace and American restraint to parsimonious prick – from “where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” to “where’s my wallet you son of a bitch?” – seems about as dramatic as any that I can think of in the gossip-mad age of the tell-all biography. The plight of the poet Philip Larkin comes to mind – the posthumous publication of his letters brought with it the sad revelation that Larkin was a bitter, racist, misogynist toad much enamored of big boobs and potty humor. Not a winning portrait by any means, but my feeling on this count always has been that if you read Larkin’s poetry and couldn’t get yourself at least halfway to such a revelation of the man himself, well, you aren’t much of a reader.

This maybe is what makes the Joe D. revelations so profound – the picture that emerges of him now seems so contrary to the picture that made him the Elegant American Hero in the first place. And let’s face it – if the tendency in the post-war era was to create impossibly perfect and elegant heroes, the tendency today is to deflate them with every sharp instrument at our disposal. We don’t want fantasies of perfection today – we want to be reassured that our own glaring imperfections are normal and acceptable, and we also want to take great schadenfreudian glee in finding that those who aspire to perfection are in fact the same petty, greedy scoundrels that we know ourselves to be.

So we have pieces like the one in the recent New Yorker, “The Lost Poems of DiMaggio,” a haiku series based on the recent diaries that mock the Clipper’s now legendary Scroogery:

Long line of children
Want to have my autograph.
That’ll be ten bucks.

Cab to the airport
Driver took the long way there
Won’t tip that bastard.

Etc. Trust me, the shit is very funny and I laughed out loud. But I felt uneasy as well. I thought of a more famous DiMaggio pop cultural appearance, the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer sees Joe D. in the coffee shop and tries to distract him from drinking his coffee. Ridiculous as it was, this Seinfeld treatment still in its way painted a picture of a deeply private and dignified man. If the show were written today, undoubtedly the joke would center on DiMaggio refusing to tip his waitress.

The same issue of The New Yorker with the DiMaggio haikus includes an article by Louis Menand about the practice of biography writing, an article that I couldn’t help but associate with Richard Ben Cramer’s mean-spirited bio of Joe D., the true Alamo of the campaign to debunk the DiMaggio myth. In this article, Menand picks apart the self-importance of two recent books, written by biographers, about the task of the biographer. Along the way he points out in his typically terse asides just how dubious the entire concept of “biography” really is, based as it so often is on questionable evidence – letters, second-hand memories, “turning point” theories, diaries – that few of us ever would wish to be judged upon ourselves. In the end, Menand summarizes the biographical impulse, both in production and consumption, in the most cynical of terms, terms that I can’t help but think would have earned a solemn nod from The Great Non-Tipper himself:

People enjoy judging other people’s lives. They enjoy it excessively. It’s not one of the species’ more attractive addictions, and, on the whole, it’s probably better to indulge it on the life of a person you have never met.

El Terrible, Erik Morales, makes his return to the ring tomorrow night against David Diaz in search of his fourth title belt in four weight classes. The fight is being billed as “The War for 4,” and yet there’s another more pressing number four that you would think might be occupying the minds of fight fans going into this bout – the four fights that El Terrible has lost in his last five trips to the ring.

Granted, three of those fights were against the best competition the sport has to offer – Marco Antonio Barrera in 2004, and then two losses to Manny Pacquiao in 2006. But it’s the fourth loss that gives more cause for concern, Morales’ defeat by unanimous decision to Philly’s own Zahir Raheem back in the fall of 2005. Anyone who saw that fight saw an Erik Morales whose time had passed and whose skills had diminished precipitously. He reached deep into his heart for a valiant loss to Pac Man in his next fight, and then met Pacquiao again last November and looked utterly listless, quitting on the canvas in the third round, an unimaginable submission for Morales in his prime, the act of a man with absolutely nothing left to give.

No fighter likes to go out on such a humiliation (video from the third Pacquiao fight is below) but one wonders how Morales expects to fare at 135 when he was being so easily outmuscled at 130. He claims that making weight at 130 was sapping his strength, and yet his only prior trip to the lightweight ranks was against Raheem, where he got thoroughly pantsed by a B-level fighter. Morales is a true Mexican legend, in a class with Chavez, and Olivares, and his sworn enemy Barrera. He’s been in the ring as a pro since he was 16 years old, and he’s participated in some of the most memorable and brutal wars of his generation. Now, as it seems we must do in boxing with every bona fide legend, we as fans settle in for the inevitably painful fifth act of Morales’ career. Let’s just hope it doesn’t drag on.

An impressively odd roster of birthdays to celebrate today, including – an Olympic gold medalist, an Olympic silver medalist, a famed but failed American Olympian and the first ever Winter Olympian from Madagascar, two baseball pitchers (one a noted knuckleballer, one who lost a game after pitching 12 shutout innings) and a speedy centerfielder, Brazilian, Portuguese and Irish footballers of note, a dope-smoking Ultimate Fighter, an anvil-tossing professional wrestler, the namesake of the AFC Championship trophy, the man who lost perhaps the most famous U.S. Open match ever played, a Flame who had his best years in Chicago, a retired three who had his best years in Phoenix, and, last but not least, Lawrence of Arabia and Archie Bunker.

Twenty-one years ago today, John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal were married in New York City. Tatum’s famous father, Ryan, was barred from the ceremony, having stolen one of Mac’s favorite words and called him a “jerk.”

It was a marriage made in tabloid heaven. They lived the high life, cavorted with Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, bought a house from Johnny Carson for a million bucks and three tennis lessons. They also took loads of drugs and generally loathed each other. According to Tatum, Mac beat her and was frequently in “a pot fog.” According to both of them, Tatum became a reclusive heroin addict who was unable to care for herself or their three children. Tatum recounted all of this (much to Mac’s dismay) in her ultimate “oh poor rich talented me” celeb tell-all, “A Paper Life,” in which she also writes about being molested and dragged to celebrity orgies and all manner of other shit that sounds terribly sad and that nonetheless she might have kept to herself.

They seperated in 1992, reportedly because Tatum wanted to go back to her film career and Mac wanted her to stay home with the kids. Years of ugly custody battles ensued, with Mac insisting that Tatum was unfit to be a mother because of her drug habits. Mac is now married to rocker Patty Smyth (“shooting at the walls of heartache…”), and he frequently performs, quite horribly we gather, in his own rock group, the Johnny Smyth Band.

And Tatum? One can only imagine.